Film celebrates history of the Virgin River Gorge

Traffic flows through the construction area in the Virgin River Gorge as work continues on the widening of a bridge in this August photo. A director’s cut of a documentary telling the story of the workers who made the now-vital corridor possible debuts Monday.(Photo: Jud Burkett / The Spectrum)Buy Photo

ST. GEORGE – When a group of tenacious work crews successfully scratched a path through the Virgin River Gorge and connected Southern Utah to the interstate highway system four decades ago, it was considered an engineering marvel.

Built at a cost of about $10 million per mile mile — the equivalent of more than $50 million in today's dollars — it was the most expensive stretch of interstate highway ever built at that time, the type of enterprise that some say could no longer be undertaken in a 21st-century environment of funding fights, lengthy permitting processes and wavering trust in government projects.

It is a feat specific to that particular time and that particular generation, filmmaker Phil Tuckett said this week, an endeavor led by veterans of World War II and a group of workers pulled from a Southern Utah community known for its perseverance and knack for overcoming the odds.

Tuckett, a former NFL football player and vice president of NFL Films, now heads Dixie State University's digital film program, and he spent much of the past year working with students to tell the story of the project's construction.

Their documentary, "My Father's Highway: Building I-15 Through the Virgin River Gorge," debuted during the DOCUTAH Film Festival in September, catching the attention of many of those in the community who had connections to the construction project.

On Monday, a special premiere is scheduled for a new director's cut version of the film, with eight minutes of additional footage and DVDs made available for the first time.

The premiere, slated for 7:30 p.m. at the Eccles Fine Arts Center on the DSU campus, should give the community another chance to find out more about the close ties between Washington County residents and the eight-year construction project that dominated the lives of so many during the eight-year construction period before the highway finally opened in 1973, Tuckett said.

"It became less of a story about how many yards of concrete were poured into the bridges and more about human element and how much these people put into it," he said.

The four-lane freeway cuts through 29 miles of Arizona's northwest corner, carving through the 500 million-year-old gorge over a complex network of river-crossing bridges, squeezing between 500-foot limestone cliffs and at times seeming to hang off the very face of the sheer rock walls.

But much of the documentary focuses on the people who made the highway possible, from President Dwight Eisenhower's plans for national defense and theories about the mob influencing project funding to the much more personal stories of the individuals who carried out the construction.

In September of 1970, St. George resident Jimmie Hughes, a 42-year-old soon-to-be father of 10, died after crashing a short-bed dump truck off an embankment inside the gorge.

His wife, Ila May, gave birth six weeks later and named the baby Jimmie in honor of his father.

Today, Jimmie Hughes the younger is a local businessman and member of the St. George City Council. He said this week that he thought the film was a great way to explain some of the events that led to St. George's growth while also preserving a piece of the area's past.

"Obviously, the freeway was a big deal in opening this place up to the rest of the world, but (the film) also really shows you that these people were just a little bit different," he said.

For residents who aren't from the area or aren't familiar with its history, the documentary provides a chance to understand more about how the uniqueness of the people who lived here contributed to what Washington County would become, he said.

"If we don't retain some of these things that make us a little different, what makes us unique, then what good are we doing," he said.

The I-15 stretch through the gorge is listed on the Federal Highway Administration's list of Nationally and Exceptionally Significant Features of the Federal Interstate Highway System.

More than 1.4 million commercial trucks travel annually on Arizona's portion of freeway, according to the Arizona Department of Transportation.